The Same Five Notes, But Endless Possibilities
A Few Words About the Blues
The pentatonic scale — five notes — is the foundation of the blues. Nothing more, nothing less. B.B. King used those five notes to become the ambassador of an entire genre. Albert King bent them into something almost violent in its emotion. Freddie King made them ache. And then one night, a left-handed kid from Seattle played Red House and rewired the world's understanding of what five notes could be.
The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.
John Lee Hooker
The blues did not stay in one place. It grew out of acoustic parlors and front porches, moved into the electrified clubs of Chicago and Memphis, spilled into rock and jazz, and never once lost what it was. Eric Clapton found God in those five notes. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Billy Gibbons kept the resurgence burning. Today, players like Joe Bonamassa walk into a room and remind everyone in it that the same five notes are still as dangerous and alive as they ever were.
Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it.
Big Bill Broonzy
What makes the pentatonic scale endure is not that it limits you. It is that it opens you. The notes sit on the guitar in exactly the right places. They are accessible. They invite players in quickly, and then — if you are willing to stay curious, to listen more than you talk, to study the masters and then forget everything you studied — they give you a lifetime of possibility.
The five notes are the same. What is endless is how you play them.
Five Notes in Code
I have been thinking a lot about programming. Not the mechanics of it — I have been doing that for twenty-five years — but the philosophy behind it. I am a thinker and an explorer by nature, always trying to understand how things fit together, what the patterns are, where the real leverage lives. I write for people who do this work. The people who tend the field, manage the equipment, understand every variable. It is not glamour. But there are always things that are deeply important, just like the blues.
There are five notes in programming, too. Not literally — but there are foundational principles, proven approaches, core instincts that every skilled developer carries. The craft is knowing them cold. The art is knowing when to let them breathe, when to stretch them, and when to bend one somewhere nobody thought to bend it before.
⚑ Observation
Most of the code I write belongs to the companies I work for. Their problems, their tools, their timelines. That is the deal, and it is a good one. But the thinking — the philosophy — that belongs to all of us. These are my five notes, offered freely.
I am tech-agnostic. The right solution is the right solution, full stop. I will reach for whatever language or tool gets the job done cleanly and leaves room for the next person. I have tried new languages, compared techniques, pushed myself outside the comfortable center of what I already know. That curiosity is not optional — it is the instrument.
When I write code, two things stay at the front of my mind. First, I am always keenly aware of the problem I am trying to solve. Not the code I want to write — the problem I am trying to fix. Second, I know the data better than I know the code, because the data is the life. The data is the band. You can play the five notes perfectly, with complete technical precision and beautiful form, but without the data — without the band — you are not going anywhere. All programs, at their core, move data from one form to another in a way that serves someone: a calculation, a diagnosis, a business decision, a social connection, a heartbeat monitor keeping someone alive.
The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits.
Willie Dixon
Did I leave a roadmap? Did I put the right structure in so it makes sense the next time someone walks in?
Steve Wozniak did not set out to build the first killer app. He set out to solve a hardware problem — how to manipulate frequencies to display color on a CRT — and he built a machine capable of things no one had fully imagined yet. That machine became the platform. The killer app came when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston built VisiCalc, the world's first electronic spreadsheet, and the Apple II's color display gave it a presence and immediacy that vaulted the personal computer into the hands of business. Woz built the instrument. VisiCalc played the song. Together, they changed civilization. Five notes. Endless possibilities. Two different curious minds, solving two different problems, creating something neither could have made alone.
IBM i and the Danger of the Box
On IBM i right now, there is something exciting happening. New tools. New people. New energy. I cannot overstate how good it feels to see this system — one of the greatest computing platforms that most of the world has never heard of — getting a wave of focused attention and forward-thinking development. The IBM i is a system with five notes. And the possibilities are enormous.
▶ Assessment
What concerns me is a pattern I see in the articles and commentary from people I genuinely respect: a tendency to put the five notes in a box and declare the box complete. This is how it is used. This is the only right way. If you are not doing it this way, you are doing something wrong.
I understand the impulse. Standards matter. Engineering principles exist for good reasons, and I follow them because they are proven. But there is a difference between principles and boxes. When we hand the next generation of IBM i developers a fully-sealed box, we are not giving them a foundation — we are giving them a ceiling.
The best work on any platform — the work that becomes a legacy of winning for the businesses that depend on it — does not come from following the same notes the same way everyone before you did. It comes from someone who understood the notes, respected them, and then played them somewhere new. Game-changing solutions are built by people who were allowed to wonder.
The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.
Ronnie Wood
We are a critical bunch, we programmers. We like to tear apart each other's work. I get it — that rigor has value. But the next person presenting a different approach might be playing Red House. They might be building the thing that takes this platform, this craft, this community somewhere none of us have been yet. Listen before you close the lid on the box.
Leave a Roadmap
When I write code, I try to solve two problems simultaneously. The first is the immediate problem in front of me. The second is the problem of the next person — the developer who will read this code six months or two years from now, trying to add a feature, fix a bug, or understand what I was thinking.
Did I leave enough room for them? Is the structure logical? Can a developer at any level read through it and say, even if I would have done this differently, I understand what he was doing here and why? Did I write it so the intent is plain, even where the constraints of the day — the timeline, the competing priorities, the tools available at the time — forced a compromise?
Good code is like good music. You know the feeling it is supposed to produce, and you build toward that. The notes are correct. The structure is sound. And you leave enough on the page that the next musician can sit down and continue the song.
The blues are what I've turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life.
Eric Clapton
We make music that is timeless. Music that benefits those who listen while thinking, while building, while solving.
The Endless Possibilities
I do not see an end to the blues. I do not see an end to IBM i. I do not see an end to programming as a human craft. This is one space where AI will find its limits, because AI has only ever seen the five notes played the way everyone else has played them. The next Wozniak moment — the next bend that nobody thought to try — will come from a human who was willing to be curious, willing to stay in the craft long enough to master it, and then willing to step outside the box.
This article is for the people who play those five notes and feel the itch to twist them, turn them, smear them over chord changes that have no business working — and make something that does. Follow the engineering principles. Honor the craft. Respect what came before. And then, when the time is right, when the problem calls for it, play like Jeff Beck: brush the blues and take it somewhere else entirely.
Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.
Jeff Beck Eric Clapton on Beck: “With Jeff, it’s all in his hands.”
Software development is changing fast. The people working hardest on those changes deserve to be heard, not boxed in. If you have the gift for taking five notes and finding the impossible in them — master that thing. Control it. Know when to use it. But never stop reaching for what the notes can become.
Key Takeaways
The pentatonic scale — five notes — has produced an infinite range of music. Programming has its own five notes: proven principles, proven patterns, proven instincts.
Mastery means knowing the notes cold. Art means knowing when to bend them.
Data is the life. The code serves the data. Always understand the problem before you write the solution.
Good code leaves a roadmap. Write for the developer who comes next.
The IBM i community has real momentum. Protect it by staying open to new interpretations of the craft.
AI knows the five notes only as others have played them. Human curiosity is still the instrument of breakthrough.
